Memory Alpha talk:Point of view
Tense: Past or Present? (moved from Memory Alpha:Ten Forward) Okay, I have looked high and low for policies on what tense to use in articles, be it past or present, and have only found a few discussions on the topic which don't really define it as policy. Personally, I thought we were looking at the POV of the 24th century, post-''Star Trek Nemesis, and therefore, all historical articles should be in past tense ''except for those subjects which are currently still around or active in the 24th century. However, Q has been changing several articles (United Federation of Planets, Andorian, Tholian) to past tense. Is this right? What, exactly, is MA's policy on this? And if there isn't one, could we perhaps create one? --From Andoria with Love 11:37, 18 Dec 2005 (UTC) *Personally, I like what Michael Warren suggested in an archived Ten Forward discussion: :The perspective of Memory Alpha ''is that of the late 24th century - ie, several years past Star Trek Nemesis, so that all events that have happened in the regular Trek timeline have already happened. ... The only exception to the past tense rule should be things that aren't a time-specific reference, ie, saying "Phasers are directed-energy weapons..." or "Archer IV is a planet...", and similar.'' That's what I thought we were doing all along. Am I right here? --From Andoria with Love 11:46, 18 Dec 2005 (UTC) :Consensus the last times we discussed this topic seemed to be to use past tense throughout exactly because the in-universe part of the encyclopedia is written from an in-universe POV (meaning that everything has to have happened already). In my opinion, to createe a consistent style, this should include everything and not be restricted to events having happened before some arbitrary date in the late 24th century. I suggest to use past tense for all in-universe articles and whatever tense seems appropriate for meta articles. -- Cid Highwind 11:51, 18 Dec 2005 (UTC) :I personally use the following. All articles should be in past tense except the episode summaries who also might be in present tense. (some argued because they are running episodes and therefore did not needed to be past tense, which is fine by me) This means, to me atleast, that the reader is looking back from a far away future back to the StarTrek universe and is reading about the history of it. Because of the lack of a 'real tense policy' I use this as reference on which I base my edits. (hence why I changed the tense on the above mentioned articles) So as far as I am concerned "Archer IV is a planet..." should be "Archer IV was a planet...", because who says that in the years after StarTrek, the timeframe of the reader, it didn't explode or existed anymore ? The same goes for the phasers. Please correct me if I am wrong. -- Q 13:07, 18 Dec 2005 (UTC) I'm not saying you're wrong (because I have no idea), but I was under the impression that we were looking at it from the POV of a few years after Nemesis, not far in the future. It would be nice to have some clarification on this, which is why I believe a tense policy should be enacted... once we find out what the policy will be, of course. :-P --From Andoria with Love 13:20, 18 Dec 2005 (UTC) :The usage of tense within MA always confused me, partially because of the lack of a good tense description, and still does, so I adapt as I go along. I didn't even known about the 'few years after Nemssis POV, go figure. I will refrain from changing tense in articles for the time being and see what this discussion brings -- Q 13:34, 18 Dec 2005 (UTC) *A few years after Nemisis is what I was working from, I was wondering why the species articles were being made past tense. Jaf 15:10, 18 Dec 2005 (UTC)Jaf :I think "a few years after Nemesis" is a good rule of thumb, but shouldn't be made official policy. What if there's some future series or movie set after Nemesis - do we rewrite all articles that now use present tense? What about events that "we" know of because of time travel? Do we use future tense in those cases? I think the most logical approach would be to use "far future" as our POV, which means past tense for all in-universe articles. Of course, articles about "timeless" things (for example, theories&principles) could be written in present tense, althought I don't know if that wouldn't make it confusing for readers? -- Cid Highwind 15:39, 18 Dec 2005 (UTC) After some searching I found this, Memory Alpha:Point of view. I must admit it this not clarify the tense to use, atleast not to me. -- Q 15:49, 18 Dec 2005 (UTC) :The idea of making everything past tense is appealing to me, for the sake of simplicity. However, the "a few years after Nemesis" idea seems prevelant, as in William Riker and others that speak in the present tense when introducing the topic. Cid's point is a good one, and I agree that "far future" is the best policy to avoid inconsistencies. Q is also right about episode summaries, all of which are in present tense from what I've seen. --Broik 17:44, 18 Dec 2005 (UTC) ::My take, FWIW: All events should be described in past tense, from the vantage point of some arbitrary amount of time after the event itself. Future events should be described in past tense too, from the vantage point of an arbitrary amount of time after the knowledge of the future events was gained in the past (e.g., "in this future timeline, Janeway had become an admiral".) ::All people should be described in past tense, even those who might be expected to live way past our arbitrary amount of time (e.g., Q, the Metron, or the Prophets). ::All objects should be in past tense, but classes of objects should be described in present tense, because the class still exists even if no instances of it still exist. E.g., "Starships are" but "the U.S.S. Enterprise was". ::Locations, including planets and cities, should always be described in present tense, because there's an expectation of permanence there, and it's a little jarring to hear "Earth was..." The exception of course is for those places that are known to no longer exist. E.g. "Vulcan is" but "the Genesis planet was". ::Political entities should always be in past tense, e.g. "the UFP was" and "the USA was", because these are more in the realm of people, where there's no expectation of permanence, than in the realm of locations, though it will be fuzzy at the edges. ::Episode summaries are ok in present tense, as these are a special type of article and it seems to work just fine. ::Have at it. --9er 18:10, 18 Dec 2005 (UTC) :I agree to adding a determined time-POV to Memory Alpha:Point of view, but maybe 2380 might be better than far future because writing about all the main characters (of this time) as if they are dead sounds a bit... strange. --Memory 22:22, 18 Dec 2005 (UTC) :: Memory, I believe the idea is to have all articles written from a POV an arbitrary number of years after the events took place, no matter when they took place, and not to name a single year and have all articles written from that POV. Doing it the second way, ENT articles would read like ancient history, while VOY eps would read like recent news. :: Also, I hadn't noticed that some character articles were written in the present tense. I took a look and the TNG characters seem to be in present tense, but most DS9 character articles are in past tense. I think the TNG character articles are in the wrong POV. --9er 23:04, 18 Dec 2005 (UTC) As a casual user of MA, let me add that I think this is the most significant problem with the entire project. Comparing MA to other comperable projects, the clear lack of consistency in POV exposes this reference to be, frankly, a work of amateurs. And debating at which year to set the POV will only exacerbate the problem. What will MA do when another Star Trek incarnation moves the timeline past whatever arbitrary year we set the POV? And setting up extremely complex rules like "planets are always in present tense" will only lead to inconsistency and continued confusion. The only way to solve this problem is to redefine the entire philosophy. Then, this new philosophy on POV should be written into the introduction, the guidelines for posting, and everywhere else prominent. It seems to me that the new philosophy should be this. All articles should be written in the past tense. All of them. Picard was not is the Captain of the Enterprise-E. Earth was not is the location of Starfleet Command. And so on. This POV is one of detached omnipresense, and is the most appropriate for a reference work like MA. Please, take this existential issue more seriously. --68.74.12.137 04:30, 31 Dec 2005 (UTC) :I agree with 9er. We should talk about it as best we know about it, the last time we checked in. I was favoring the post-Nemesis idea, but I like this better. As we learn more about something, it should move up the tense. If we saw the person die (or things regarding their death occured), it should be past tense, like Trip Tucker and Tasha Yar. However, to avoid everything in Enterprise and TOS sounding like ancient history, they should refer to the last we know about them. True, we know that T'Pol is long dead in the later series, but her death is never mentioned (AFAIK), so it would work to refer to her as if the ENT finale just occured. Also, with events in the far future, also past tense. For example, Captain Braxton travelled back in time, not he will travel back in time. However, this only works with biographical articles. For historical articles, the post-Nemesis thing works best. We need to retain one viewpoint for an entire article. For example, if we were describing Earth's history, we wouldn't want to talk about different people from different times like they lived together. Episode summaries are fine in present tense, like a running description. To sum this whole thing up, as Braxton said in "Relativity," "I gave up trying to keep my tenses straight years ago." -[[User:Platypus222|'Platypus Man']] | ''Talk'' 05:19, 31 Dec 2005 (UTC) ::How will that help either? It doesn't work for biographical references because some characters span more than one series, thus bringing up more confusion over the POV. Are we supposed to refer to Spock in present tense in Unification and past-tense for Amok Time? Imagine having to change the tense of an article every time a new episode or movie came out... Now that I think about it, I just find it professionally unsound to use different tenses for different situations, because not all people will be aware of certain guidelines, causing mass confusion, edits, and reverts with the original editor wondering why people keep changing his tense when he thinks it's a few years after Nemesis. Also, if we go by that Nemesis idea, then we have to refer to events in the future as future tense... i.e. the Enterprise-J, Tox Uthat, etc. I say we just write up a convention that dictates past-tense only. --Madame Arsenic 22:09, 4 Jan 2006 (UTC) :::I'm not saying that we change from present to past; it would stay in the past tense, but from when will we be looking will change. In your Spock example, for his bio, we would refer to the events of both episodes in the past tense, but "Unification" would feel more recent than "Amok Time." For Uhura, however, we would use the past tense from the last we saw or heard of her (Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, as best I know) so that her life wouldn't seem ancient. We wouldn't write her history as if she died centuries ago, but like if Undiscovered Country just happened. -[[User:Platypus222|'Platypus Man']] | ''Talk'' 02:51, 5 Jan 2006 (UTC) Well, I've read all your comments on this and gave it a try to put in words. I made a temp page of it which you can find here, Memory Alpha:Point of view/temp. I myself feel this change needs voting to make it 'official'. Please comment on the article tense. -- Q 20:22, 18 January 2006 (UTC) :Hm, ok, let's take it. --Memory 21:33, 19 January 2006 (UTC) ::I think that past tense is the only way to logically go. Other thoughts on the draft are on the TEMP page. Aholland 19:57, 6 March 2006 (UTC) Proposed Amendment There has been a lot of discussion about the question whether articles about novels and esp. episodes are from an in-universe perspective or not and whether they should get the realworld-tag or not. The current policy states "Memory Alpha's point of view (POV) is that of a character inside the fictional Star Trek universe. The only exceptions to this rule are articles about the Star Trek franchise and production (eg. articles on books, comics, actors, staff, etc.), which naturally are not part of the Star Trek universe." This would necessitate articles about novels and epiodes to be out-universe, as they are not written from an in-universe character's perspective in its main body (as opposed to citations and background notes which are labelled as not being part of the article's main content itself). A possible clarfied/amended policy could read like this: "Memory Alpha's point of view (POV) is that of a character inside the fictional Star Trek universe. The only exceptions to this rule are articles about the Star Trek franchise and production (eg. articles on actors, production staff, series, reference books etc.), which naturally are not part of the Star Trek universe. However, due to the fact that articles about novels, episodes and comics are both written from an out-universe and in-universe perspective, they are in their entirety considered as being within the Star Trek universe." So, I proposed this, but still oppose it. IMO articles about novels,comics and episodes are from a production POV and should be labeled as such. Kennelly 00:54, 23 January 2007 (UTC) :Actually, the big question that has arisen of late is... whether or not novels, comics, episodes, etc are considered realworld or not (personally, I think that it's pretty damned obvious that they're mostly from production POV and partly from in-universe POV, but that's beside the point), are articles that arise from them (such as characters in novels that span multiple novels, such as the Q Continuum characters (for example) "real world" because they are non-canon, or are they in-universe? Again, I think that the answer is fairly obvious in that they are in-universe, despite the fact that they are non-canon items. :This whole discussion seems to have arisen from converting articles about stuff seen in deleted scenes into realworld "background info" articles, and thus it seems that people automatically assume that all non-canon materials should have a realworld flag on them. Perhaps it would be better to add a second tag, such as "non-canon" to accomodate this instead. :Just my 19 cents. -- Sulfur 01:27, 23 January 2007 (UTC) ::While I don't disagree with you per se on the idea of a non-canon flag, if we go that route, how do we differentiate ourselves from Memory Beta, which is now deliberately trying to cover the stuff that we supposedly don't cover, i.e. licensed non-canon Trek material (which mostly consists of novels)? -- Renegade54 01:32, 23 January 2007 (UTC) As an addendum to Kennelly's proposal above, I think that whichever way we decide, it should hold for all episodes, movies, novels, and comics (i.e. articles about Star Trek "stories" or Star Trek "events"), and not one way for episodes, but another for novels, etc. Also, there are previous discussions here, here and here for reference. -- Renegade54 01:29, 23 January 2007 (UTC) In the year 4000... I removed the reference saying that we're editing MA from the point of view of someone living in at least 4000. I don't think specifying an exact year is necessary; linking to the far future (32nd century and beyond, apparently) should do. --From Andoria with Love 04:16, 23 March 2007 (UTC) Tense : From Talk:Gorn Must we again have this debate? Facts that are not historical should be in present-tense. This includes all references to biology. -- Kingfisher 01:40, 25 March 2007 (UTC) : Where is the debate?--Tim Thomason 01:44, 25 March 2007 (UTC) Talk:Altarian marsupial -- Kingfisher 01:47, 25 March 2007 (UTC) :::Kingfisher, this debate has been going on since a hell of a lot longer than you have been here, and it was decided to do things in past tense. You can't just come along and change everything for the hell of it when we have an existing practice. --OuroborosCobra talk 01:48, 25 March 2007 (UTC) ::The complaint he has in particular is that he is going and changing all tenses of any biological species that has not been seen on screen to be extinct to present tense, no matter their prior tense or the debate occurring at MA:POV. The problem is that there is no consensus on the matter as yet other than the fact that the encyclopedia should be written from the POV of someone in the "far future" (whenever that is, intentionally no date given). Now, one school states that planets, stars, and elements should be (thus) in present tense since they are "eternal", and that everything else should be past tense. The other school holds that, unless we see someone end, we should assume that it's all still totally and utterly current. That's the debate. ::For the time being, may I suggest holding off on edit wars on these pages until such a time as the debate is settled? -- Sulfur 01:49, 25 March 2007 (UTC) Reaching a consensus is what I proposed yesterday, with no follow-up. Also, my issue includes life-forms, species, planets, stars, and anything else "natural". I still maintain that the situation of MA as an in-universe encyclopedia is no different from that of any other general encyclopedia, which have to deal the same different types of articles. The way they handle tense works, so what's the huge issue? -- Kingfisher 01:56, 25 March 2007 (UTC)